In 1989, Choi Suk Fong and a handful of Hong Kong-based journalists travelled to Beijing to cover the student pro-democracy movement, where thousands of students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, pressing for political reform and an end to corruption.
General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who was the highest-ranking Communist Party official in the country at the time, visited students in the square, and reportedly told the crowd: "We’ve come too late.”
”You have good intentions. You want our country to become better. The problems you have raised will eventually be resolved. But things are complicated, and there must be a process to resolve these problems.”
It was to be one of his last political acts. He was ousted from the Party and placed under house arrest for the next 16 years, until his death.
After seven weeks of protests by students and workers, soldiers and tanks chased and killed demonstrators and onlookers in the streets leading to the square on June 4 1989.
After three whole decades, the memories of what happened in the square are still vivid in Ms Choi's memory, and she still has to cope with reliving the trauma again and again.
She told herself that she had to get herself out of this thinking.
A sea of student protesters gathers in Tiananmen Square on 4 May 1989. Source: Corbis Historical
"I feel that I have nowhere to go, nowhere to live in the past few years. Even in Hong Kong, there is not a place where I could put down this burden. I can only wander with my body and soul," Ms Choi told SBS Cantonese.
Ms Choi left Hong Kong and now lives abroad, where she tries to use her love for painting to help herself cope with the trauma.
She denounced what the Chinese government did and said following the massacre.
A grief-stricken mother who has just learned of the death of her son, a student protester killed by soldiers at Tiananmen Square. Source: Corbis Historical
"Why did we not know what has actually happened in the Tiananmen protests? After all these years, things are still covered in the dark. No matter how many photos and videos are released, how many testimonies and information of the deads are revealed, the Chinese government still chooses to ignore and even try to suppress them."
She said she was most devastated when Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo passed away two years ago, saying she couldn't understand "why a country cannot stand the existence of a noble and moral person?"
She said in China, even if one wants to speak of the Tiananmen Square protests or visit the parents of those who died in the crackdown or pay respect to the dead, one can be arrested on charges of "suspicion of inciting subversion of state power". These people are regarded as "moral criminals".
Dissident activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died of liver cancer while under police custody. Source: AAP
Ms Choi said she had been gathering information of such people. Up to now, she has collected information on over 1000 of these individuals. She said she is a "prisoner-in-soul" with them.
This year marked the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre. Ms Choi returned to Hong Kong earlier this year and worked on some videos and articles about the protests with a group of journalists.
"For the past thirty years, every time I tried to organise my thoughts and memory, I still cannot let it go."
